She found hot dogs in the refrigerator, a carton of milk, and not much else. She needed groceries but hated leaving the house. People stared at her and the girls like they were from Mars. When triplets had shown up on Wendy’s ultrasound, she demanded to know their sex. She would have terminated the pregnancy had they all been boys. She liked males fine, but three boys would have killed her. As it was, three girls were doing a pretty good job.
As she put a pot of water on the stove, she thought of her dream. She had ridden horses before, but didn’t enjoy it. She thought horses were stupid, too highly-strung. Once, while riding an old mare in Virgil, they came upon a tiny creek, and the horse freaked out and threw her. She landed on a big rock and wrecked her back. Later the trainer admitted that running water spooked the beast. What a fucked up thing. She had never dreamed of horses before. She wondered what it meant.
While the hot dogs boiled away, the girls sat at the kitchen table rubbing crayons over colouring books and nibbling cheese-sticks with expired due dates. Seeing no mold, Wendy figured the cheese-sticks were fine. Just then the doorbell rang. The girls jumped up and raced to the door, almost trampling Tatters, one of two Siamese cats sharing the flat with the humans. Max, hiding somewhere, only ventured out at night. Tatters raised her head and wailed. The cats were bizarre, but they had cost Chris a grand, and had grown on Wendy.
When she opened the door a big man stood there with a clipboard and a poised silver pen. Sunglasses hid his eyes. At first she mistook him for a traveling salesman or a canvasser—he looked too buffed to be a Jehovah’s Witness. Swarthy, with big arms and broad shoulders, he cut quite a figure. His white shirt seemed just-pressed despite the humid weather, his black silk tie clipped with a red-jeweled silver bar. The man smiled and nodded.
“Hello,” he said. “My name is Felix Torres, I’m with the Ministry of Child and Youth Services.” He glanced at the sheet on the clipboard. “Is this Connor Kovach’s residence?”
Wendy nodded. “Yeah, but he hasn’t been around.”
“Connor’s probation officer referred him to me for cognitive programming. Anger management, anti-criminogenic thinking, and so on. I’m here for an intake.”
These words came at Wendy in a whirring, incomprehensible stream. She didn’t know what to say. The guy’s smile started creeping her out, the teeth too white or something.
Felix glanced at the clipboard again. “Legal guardian listed as a Wendy Smith.”
“That’s me,”she said, involuntarily touching her hair. “I’m the aunt. His father’s sister.”
“Okay,” he said, winking at the triplets huddled around Wendy.
“Girls,” she said sharply.
They squealed and retreated.
Felix continued smiling. “I understand Connor has no contact with his father.”
“No, and his mum’s in rehab at Collingwood ’til October. Connor never calls or anything. They aren’t close like that.” Ashamed to admit this, Wendy looked down at her small, bare feet—a further embarrassment—chewed up like meat from years of bad shoes,.
Felix frowned and ticked off a box on the sheet with his shiny pen. “This program falls under the umbrella of extra-judicial measures—initiated recently as a consequence of the revised Youth Criminal Justice Act.”
Again, the man’s words whirred by in a stream of guttural gasps and clicks that made no sense. But she noticed that Felix wore no wedding band, and warmly smiled at him, so handsome in his way, so strong and sure, and he returned the smile.
Ronnie came by in the morning, screaming about being killed, that they were going to kill him. He stared right through Wendy as he screamed, waking up the girls, who scrambled from the bedroom to the bathroom in their pink pajamas. Twitching and drooling, Ronnie looked deranged, likely fucked up on crack cocaine. Crack fries the central nervous system, triggering frenzies and hallucinations. Wendy knew all about that. She’d had her time with crack.
“Just keep your voice down,” she whispered. She hated Ronnie barging in whenever he felt like it, the fucking tool. She hated all these weak and stupid men. Her father was the same. An asshole through and through. If not for Mom, the family would have ended up on the street. As it was, working all kinds of nasty jobs, never saying no to anything, no matter how degrading, she eked out enough for bare necessities, while Dad drank beer and porked their slutty neighbours whenever he could get it up.
Tears welled in Ronnie’s ruined eyes. “Listen—listen to me. If they come here—no, don’t say anything. Say you haven’t seen me.”
Wendy glanced down the hall and saw Doris’s head pop out of the bathroom. Not Doris—Deb the little bitch, playing games again, grimacing like Doris did when something scared her. Deb didn’t scare so easy. Wendy laughed, almost proud of how clever they were. But she’d call Deb on it later and see what the little lady had to say for herself.
“Tell them you haven’t seen me,” Ronnie said. “I don’t want you involved.”
She felt like kicking him in the nuts for saying that. “What’s going on, Ronnie?”
Elbows together, he cringed. “They’ll fucking kill me!” He rocked on his heels, wheezed, his asthma acting up. Luckily, he had a puffer and took a few hits. But while this relieved the chest congestion it did nothing for his state of mind.
Wendy seized his arm. “Get it together for a sec, man. Who the fuck is going to kill you? Ronnie, look at me. Look at me.”
He turned up his face with wide, terrified eyes, tilting his head as if appealing to her humanity. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He mumbled something, then abruptly bolted for the door. She heard it open and slam shut. A car engine turned over. Tires squealed. Then she heard nothing but the girls bawling in the bathroom, and the cats bawling in the hall.
After that night, Ronnie disappeared. He left Wendy with no money to care for Connor, no forwarding address, nothing. A week passed and he didn’t call. He didn’t even send a postcard like that time he split to Vancouver for a month. Wendy still remembered that card, a shot of mountains, oceans, and whales. Was it really like that there? She doubted Ronnie was checking out whales this time.
Ronnie was hard to love, maybe harder to like. When he first presented Kim to her, Wendy almost shit herself. Kim was a looker, Ronnie no Romeo. It all made more sense when she learned of Kim’s love of cocaine.
Connor called one afternoon.
“Auntie Wen,” he said. “Is my old man around?”
“Nah. This guy came here looking for you. This Felix dude. Says you have to call him right away. He left a card. Sounded like he meant business.”
“Whatever. Tell him to smoke my bone next time you talk to him. Fucking fag.”
“He’s just doing his job, Connor.” Wendy wanted to hang up. “Your old man stopped by a few days ago and I haven’t seen or heard from him since.”
“He was supposed to leave some money.”
“He left nothing.”
“That motherfucker.” Connor hung up.
That just about summed up everything. Late for her methadone fix, Wendy had a hint of the bugs. The bugs used to plague her when she was using hard. Got so bad she started carving up her arms. She butchered her left arm, cutting right into the bone. The doctors warned they’d have to amputate it from the shoulder if she continued cutting. But the arm healed on its own. Wendy considered it divine intervention. She went to rehab after that, cleaned herself up as much as she could.
When the girls first saw the scars they cried and cried and hugged her. Wendy told them they were old wounds, healed over now. They didn’t need to worry. Took some convincing, but they came around. After that, whenever she exposed the arms, they’d gently mock her. Look at Miss Alligator! Doris would cry and the other two would join in a taunt.
Miss Alligator! Miss Alligator! Mom-my is Miss Alligator!
The plastic alligator in the bathroom entered the scene only after Doris first made the comparison. It didn’t bother Wendy, though sometimes it did. As for Conno
r—fuck him if he was jammed up. She had her own problems. In the bathroom she popped four Percodans. Fuck everyone, she thought.
She promised to take the girls shopping for new school clothes. Cash-strapped and maxed out on her only credit card, she worried about keeping that promise; if she bought the girls nothing, they’d be bummed out. She dressed them up in matching white outfits with pink lace trim, white socks, and white shoes. She tied pink bows in their hair—Doris complained that it hurt—and looked at them. Pretty as dolls. Sometimes after a fix she had trouble keeping up. But they knew the routine, and behaved on Wendy’s “medicine” appointments.
Not far from her flat, near Silver City, the clinic skirted a cluster of squalid tenements and skeletal factories. The overcast sky pressed on Wendy’s temples. Then the Percodans came on and she flowed across an intersection with the girls trailing her like cotton candy faeries. A man in a silver Buick with a grey beard and bullet-grey eyes rolled down his window and yelled an obscenity. Happened all the time. Maybe the way she dressed or looked provoked it, or maybe something deeper tagged her. They never ever let her forget who she was. Never.
“Mommy, what did that man say?” Donna asked.
Wendy said nothing and led the girls to the clinic. Junkies crowded the entrance. Many knew the girls by name and traded greetings perfunctorily. The nurse in the bulletproof dispensing booth, a pleasant, ruddy lady called Cheryl, always shot out of her seat when she saw the girls, and handed them granola bars. The girls despised granola bars but took them graciously, and saved them in a shoe box for—as they put it—another rainy day.
That they had lived through many rainy days, and expected more, broke Wendy’s heart. So unfair. But what was fair? She neared the glass shaking in her shoes. The nurse gave her the juice in a small plastic cup. Wendy drank it down while a security guard joked with the triplets. Old and kindly, a hint of the molester shaded his profile. You couldn’t trust anyone these days. Simple as that.
On their way out, Wendy noticed a wall calendar with a picture of a pinto—the bloody source of the dream horse. What a disappointment. Outside she lit a cigarette. She smoked less than ever these days. Her uncle Norm had just died of lung cancer. He looked freakish after a lung removal, wheezing like a torn accordion. Probably better to die of an overdose than go out like that. But after a fix she loved a smoke. You smoked it slow and felt every fibre of tobacco and paper crackling and burning and sending its dark whisper through your body. The girls watched, rapt. She had caught them once with cigarettes in the bathroom; they had dropped the matches in the toilet bowl and never lit up. She beat them for an hour after that, bursting Donna’s eardrum. Boy, did she howl. She howled so loud at the hospital they never got around to asking her how she hurt the ear; Wendy told them she fell from a swing. The other girls confirmed this.
They walked to the mall, a thirty-minute hike from the clinic. It felt like hours to Wendy, but she savored every moment—beside herself to see the girls so well behaved and pretty, what angels—and didn’t want it to end. The girls sang and skipped along. They were off to get clothes, something to make any girl happy.
The foul and humid air washed over Wendy like warm water; and the hard, rough facades of Silver City yielded to a smudged blue-grey tranquility, an exquisite ballooning that even swooping seagulls could not burst.
She outfitted the girls on the cheap, by stealing, risky given modern security measures. But Ronnie had given her pointers. He excelled at ripping off shops. The trick was finding one with a faulty security system—flawed, or in disrepair. Of course, stores never alerted the public to breakdowns—please don’t rob us while our security system is kaput!—but they happened.
So Wendy sniffed around the mall and tested several systems until she hit the jackpot at a tony children’s boutique. The silly young salesgirl, flattered by Wendy’s compliments about her fucked up blue hair, noticed nothing untoward, and Wendy managed to lift three outfits, in three pretty colours, right from under her pierced nose. She also purchased a few inexpensive accessories to further dodge suspicion; and the girls, hiding smirks, played along.
When they emerged from the boutique, they looked like cats after a canary feast and hurried down the street, unable to contain themselves. Even Wendy got caught up in the excitement, losing some of her buzz, but still feeling good. That it took an episode of shoplifting to make their hearts beat faster and their blood race saddened her, but for now she put that aside.
They found Connor at the flat—petting a reluctant Max—with some other boys dressed in black clothes. They looked far too serious for teens. They occupied the living room like pirates, dark and sardonic, their smiles masking malice. Wendy smelled it on them and felt her stomach muscles tighten. She recognized the boy on the chesterfield with the red bandanna tied around his head, Ryan Clair.
“What are you boys up to?” she asked.
“Just chilling,” Connor said with an unfamiliar drawl.
She stared at him and he reddened, dropping the cat with a thud. Auntie Wen was embarrassing him.
“How long do you plan to just chill?” she asked. “I’ve got things to do around here.”
“Nice little girls you got there, miss,” said a boy in a wicker chair by the window.
“You’re too heavy for that chair,” she said. “Go sit somewhere else.” When he didn’t move she said it louder. “Go sit somewhere else, or get the fuck out of my house.”
“Auntie Wen,” Connor said. “The chair is fine.”
Wendy stared at her nephew.
“I mean, it ain’t breaking or anything.”
“Get out of my house,” she said in a quiet but firm tone. The girls got up on their tiptoes and cupped their mouths. They recognized that tone, understood its seriousness.
Connor fumed, rubbed his hands together. His posse, five strong, adjusted themselves. The boy in the wicker chair found a stool by a small bookshelf with an empty fish bowl on top of it. Tatters the cat had dined on Barney the escaped goldfish a few evenings back. The girls mourned the passing with feeling. It bothered Wendy to see that moron near the fish bowl.
A stocky fellow with a shaved head and tattoos on his neck stepped over to Connor and said something in his ear. The others exchanged glances.
Wendy sent the girls to their bedroom. When they hesitated she said, “Go to your bedroom now or I’ll put you to sleep forever.”
This drew smirks and sniffs of laughter from the boys.
“Hey, Auntie Wen,” Ryan said, handling a rag doll robed in red gingham. “That sounds like abuse to me, see what I’m saying? I mean threatening the children and all, not nice.”
“Mind your own business,” Wendy snapped.
Ryan flung the rag doll against the wall. He grinned at her through clenched teeth. She could sense his willingness to smash her face, put the boots to her. Chris used to work himself up like that when he couldn’t get his own way. Like Chris, Ryan was all about beating up a woman. You could tell with some males. You could see it in their eyes, that bottomless gaze looking right through things. And it wasn’t Ryan’s friendship with Connor that held him back. Something else explained that.
“Connor,” Wendy said. “Do your girlfriends mind if we talk in private for a sec?”
“Bitch has some mouth on her bro,” said the short stocky guy.
“Connor, I’m talking to you,” she said, her voice cracking.
He rolled his eyes. Then his expression darkened and he stood up. “Auntie Wen,” he said. He glanced at his crew and fought a grin as he continued, keeping his chin tucked down and averting her gaze. “My dad said he gave you a bunch of money before you took custody of me, in case of emergency. I know he did because he said it.”
“What are you talking about, Connor? Your father’s a deadbeat. He never gave me a dime, not even for emergencies, if that’s what you’re wondering. Nothing. Not one penny.”
“She’s lying,” Ryan said, “I can tell. My dad taught me how to tell when s
omeone’s lying. Their eyes—it’s all in the eyes, bro. I can tell the bitch is lying by the way she keeps looking down the hall.”
Wendy almost burst out laughing. She kept looking to see if the girls had come out. She fought the urge to slap her nephew’s face—they’d kill her. The living room reeked of their pomade, cologne and sweat. And they still might, she thought.
“Auntie Wen,” Connor said. “Listen. If you don’t tell me where the money is, someone’s gonna get hurt. See what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, Auntie Wen,” Ryan chimed. “You’re in danger.”
Wendy noticed one of the boys standing at the living room entrance, arms folded across his chest, just daring her to make a move. The buzz from the methadone and Percodans had all but worn off; her head ached and nausea fingered her tonsils. She also felt the bugs coming on, wriggling over her arms, neck, and shoulders. The boys gaped as her head and arms shook.
“What the fuck!” cried one.
“Bitch is psycho,” remarked another.
Connor had seen his aunt suffer the bugs before and felt a pang of sympathy as she writhed and contorted. Horrible to watch. He turned his face. The others found it hilarious, laughing and hacking. Connor did nothing to silence them. He must have known that his aunt had no money, but he did nothing to help her.
The fellows stirred, scraping boots across the hardwood floor, flexing muscles. Ryan removed something from a pocket of his combat pants. A knife with a serrated blade. Wendy held her breath as he flashed it and affected a manic Joker’s grin. As he twirled the knife, the stocky guy stepped on Max’s tail and the cat somersaulted across the room, thudding down on a Persian rug by the closet.
“What a fucking athlete,” someone said. “Let’s see it again.”
“Yeah, encore,” chirped someone else.
Ryan neared Wendy and held the knife so close to her throat she could feel the cold of the steel. “What do you say, junky mama? How about I hook you up right here, right now. I’ve got some killer China smack just off the boat, and I mean killer. Not recommended for amateurs. But you and Mr. Brownstone go back a long way. My old man used to sell to you. Jacky Clair, remember? That’s right. Jacky Clair, my papa, the King of Horse they used to call him in the old days. The King of Horse—you know, like the King of Beer. Like the King of Beer, only heroin—horse. That’s what they used to call it in the old days. These bozos don’t know what I’m talking about. But you do, don’t you Miss Junky? Yes, you do. Jacky’s doing a dime in Kingston now because of cunts like you.” Ryan stopped talking and withdrew the knife.
Black Rabbit and Other Stories Page 5